News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech. Parent comment

Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by CWuestefeld on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @03:49PM (#20751224)
This is very troubling to me. My employer's revenue is quite to this level yet, but it's within view. We're a LAR/VAR of computer products, so naturally we've got an ecommerce website. A minority of the products available on it are for services we provide. This seems to be saying that we wouldn't be allowed to do business this way anymore.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by munk-a on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:31PM (#20751751)
I believe you'd be quite able to continue as long as your business either exclusively listed their own products... or stopped participating on the open marketplace you're hosting.

It'd be interested to see if this law would interact poorly with partner product reselling - "Oh yea, if you buy our CAD module we'll throw in a free copy of CAD with it" might actually come afoul the law, depending on the specifics. I'm sorta okay with losing that though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by icebraining on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:00PM (#20751378)
Do your services compete with those of third-parties you sell on the site?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by 0xffff2 on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:08PM (#20751490)
Is that a distinction Warren has made? It doesn't appear to be a distinction made in the article.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by icebraining on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:20PM (#20751629)
You're right; I went looking for the plan, and it's not there: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

That said, it only seems to apply to marketplaces and platforms, not to regular retailers. I'm not sure what a LAR/VAR counts as, though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by mc32 on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:00PM (#20752640)
I think it would apply to companies with $xX billions in annual revenue.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech by CWuestefeld on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @09:43AM (#20757048)
Right. So my employer is at $10B today, and our growth is such that achieving that arbitrary $25B is a reasonable goal.

I've been with the company since we were less than $500M.

So at what arbitrary point do we cross from being a good guy to being an evil corporate titan that must be broken up? I don't feel like we've gotten evil; it feels like as we've grown we've built a greater capacity to server our customers better.

[ Parent | on HN ]